Will ‘parivarvad’ be SP’s trump card against BJP in bypolls?
Five of the 10 UP assembly seats that would go to bypolls are held by SP. To retain these, the party is mulling fielding family members of those who held these seats
LUCKNOW Will the Samajwadi Party (SP) bank on ‘Parivarvad’ against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on half the seats in the forthcoming UP assembly bypolls? Even as the saffron party braces for this battle after the Lok Sabha poll debacle in UP, the mood in the SP indicates that it will use ‘Parivarvad’ as ammo, along with its winning social engineering formula of PDA (Pichhada, Dalit, and Alpsankhyak).
Of the 10 UP assembly seats that would go to bypolls, five are held by the SP. These are - Karhal (Mainpuri), Kundarki (Moradabad), Katehari (Ambedkar Nagar), Milkipur (Ayodhya), and Sisamau (Kanpur). Four of these seats would go to bypolls because SP MLAs on these seats who won the 2024 LS polls subsequently quit their assembly memberships while one seat - Sisamau - got vacant because its then MLA Irfan Solanki lost his membership on his conviction in a criminal case.
To retain these five seats, the party is mulling fielding family members of those who held these seats. The SP is likely to field its newly elected Faizabad MP Awadhesh Prasad’s son Ajit Prasad to defend the Milkipur assembly seat.
Awadhesh had created a political sensation of sorts by winning the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat in Ayodhya district by defeating two-time BJP MP Lallu Singh. The BJP had lost the Faizabad seat to SP in less than five months after the grand Pran Pratishtha of Ram temple in Ayodhya on January 22.
Similarly, SP is likely to field its Ambedkar Nagar MP Lalji Verma’s daughter Chhaya Verma for the Katehari (Ambedkar Nagar) assembly seat that fell vacant after Lalji Verma resigned from it to retain the Ambedkar Nagar Lok Sabha seat. Chhaya Verma had contested UP assembly bypolls on Jalalpur (Ambedkar Nagar) seat as BSP candidate in 2019 but failed to win. At that time, Lalji Verma was BSP MLA from Katehari. The BJP won Katehari only once in 1991. Lalji Verma won it in 2017 as BSP candidate and then in 2022 as SP candidate.
Former Mainpuri MP Tej Pratap Yadav is the likely SP candidate for Karhal (Mainpuri) seat vacated by SP chief Akhilesh Yadav. He was initially fielded on Kannauj seat as the SP LS candidate but was later replaced by Akhilesh. The BJP had never won this seat; while the seat was with SP since 1993.
Kundarki (Moradabad) seat is likely to have someone from the Barq family as the candidate. Zia-ur-Rehman Barq won the seat in 2022 assembly polls, but the SP made him contest Sambhal after sitting SP MP and party’s 2024 LS poll candidate Shafiq-ur-Rehman Barq died shortly before elections. Zia is the grandson of Shafiq-ur-Rehman Barq and he quit Kundarki membership after getting into the Lok Sabha.
The BJP won Kundarki only once in 1993 and the seat has been with SP since 2012.
The Sisamau (Kanpur) seat has been with the SP since 2012. It would go to bypolls as its MLA Irfan Solanki has been convicted and given seven-year imprisonment by a court in Kanpur in a criminal case. Someone from Irfan Solanki’s family or Vandana Bajpai, wife of Kanpur’s Arya Nagar SP MLA Amitabh Bajpai, might be the candidate on this seat.
At this stage, the SP is not ready to confirm the speculation.
A senior SP leader said: “The party and its president Akhileshji will decide. We will win all 10 seats, irrespective of whosoever will be our candidates on our five seats and the other five.”
The SP is exploring caste permutations on the five other seats that fell vacant after BJP and allies vacated them. The seats are Khair (Aligarh ), Phulpur (Prayagraj), Ghaziabad (Ghaziabad), Majhawan (Mirzapur) and Meerapur (Muzaffarnagar).
The SP is also likely to give two of these seats to alliance partner Congress.